A bridal entrepreneur wins investors' hearts

Kellie Khalil built a fast-growing audience and attracted capital by aggregating great wedding ideas online. But she fell out of love with her design team along the way.

Tina Traster

Published: November 30, 2012 - 5:35 am

Kellee Khalil, 28, got her first taste of the $99 billion wedding industry when she worked at her sister Leila Lewis' Be Inspired PR firm in 2009 in Los Angeles. The boutique PR firm serves the bridal industry.

But inspiration to start her own company was unveiled after she helped plan her sister's wedding.

“There was no central place online to search for inspiring ideas, retailers or vendors,” said Ms. Khalil. “Google is not focused. There's an overwhelming amount of content for brides. That gave me the idea to build a vertical search engine for wedding planning.”

In January 2011, lover.ly was launched and is slated to generate $1.5 million in 2013. The fast-growing site, which aggregates content from 35 wedding blogs and magazines, is a search engine and scrapbook for wedding planning.

Brides use the site to gather ideas for weddings and link to products and services they can purchase. It lets them save images they like into “bundles” to share with friends and family.

The site shows more than 80,000 products from 700 brands. When a bride clicks on a Vera Wang dress or an engagement ring, each click-per-image generates revenue. Lover.ly earns 30 cents to $1.80 per click from the brands.

Lover.ly also makes money by helping wedding bloggers like Bridal Musings and Snippet & Ink secure advertising from retailers such as jeweler Kwiat and retailers Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's. “We sell ads on behalf of bloggers and split the revenue 50/50,” said Ms. Khalil.

The entrepreneur draws inspiration from her father, a Lebanese immigrant who came to the U.S. in the early 1970s with empty pockets, speaking no English. He worked his way up from gas station janitor to owner of a company that sold gas stations in-store promotional programs from major brands.

“My father's achievements were the quintessential American dream,” said Ms. Khalil. “I will feel like a failure if I'm not able to do something bigger than what he did.”

HITS

After only six months of developing lover.ly, Ms. Khalil scored $500,000 in seed money from a dozen angel investors. At the time, she had a commitment from eight bloggers to aggregate content and only a prototype website. But the entrepreneur's tenacious networking at events and conferences like 500 Startups and NY Tech Meetup helped her build a solid network of relationships and mentors.

“I would meet with angels every month or so and show them my progress,” she said. “I started out asking for advice, not money.” But when it came time to present her idea, she had a built-in audience who believed in her vision and her passion. “The fact that an engine like this didn't exist and that I was investing $70,000 of my own money helped,” she said.

MISSES

In January 2011, Ms. Khalil hired a Canadian digital agency to build her website. It would cost $40,000 and take four months. Or so she thought. Things did not go smoothly. “They just couldn't build it,” she said. As many entrepreneurs do, she ended up throwing good money after bad. By June, the lover.ly founder ponied up an additional $40,000 and the site was still dysfunctional.

There was one bright spot, however. Nick Wynja, the project liaison, seemed to understand what Ms. Khalil wanted. She persuaded Mr. Wynja to join her firm and then hired a crackerjack engineer, Ari Bernstein. Additionally, the pair brought on engineering students from New York University to intern. Within two months, the website was ready for prime time. “What I learned was that I should have hired an in-house team that was vested in the success of the company right from the beginning,” she said.